News carries with it a powerful mythology, leading people to regard news as a mirror that is held up to society, a window on the world that tells "the way it is." Moving beyond this unproblematic view of journalism opens a wide range of important questions to research, predicated on the idea that news, like other forms of knowledge, is socially constructed.

The many attempts to explain the production of news have often taken a sociology of media view, which considers how media power functions within a larger social context. More narrowly, this approach is equated with the newsroom ethnographies that have been carried out by sociologists such as Herbert Gans and Gaye Tuchman. Taken more broadly, it suggests that the structural context of journalism must be tackled, moving beyond the more narrow attempt to psychologize the news process through the attitudes and values...